Citing purported risks of nuclear blackmail, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the treaty in June 2002, leading to its termination.

The development of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) systems allowed a single ICBM to deliver as many as ten separate warheads at a time.

The United States first proposed an anti-ballistic missile treaty at the 1967 Glassboro Summit Conference during discussions between U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union Alexei Kosygin.

[6]: 4-5  Following the proposal of the Sentinel and Safeguard decisions on American ABM systems, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began in November 1969 (SALT I).

The treaty was signed during the 1972 Moscow Summit on 26 May by the President of the United States, Richard Nixon and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev; and ratified by the U.S. Senate on 3 August 1972.

Andropov said, "It is time Washington stopped thinking up one option after another in search of the best way of unleashing nuclear war in the hope of winning it.

[10][11] Regardless of the opposition, Reagan gave every indication that SDI would not be used as a bargaining chip and that the United States would do all in its power to build the system.

SDI research was cut back following the end of Reagan's presidency, and in 1995 it was reiterated in a presidential joint statement that "missile defense systems may be deployed... [that] will not pose a realistic threat to the strategic nuclear force of the other side and will not be tested to... [create] that capability."

[16] Thus, TMD supporters argued, the treaty did not prohibit systems that defended against the countering of theatre ballistic missiles.

According to these new agreements, the treaty permitted missile defense systems to have a velocity up to 5 km/s as long as it had not been tested against targets traveling faster than 5 km/s.

[17] As a result, Clinton never submitted the agreement to Congress, fearing that Helms would stall their ratification or defeat it outright.

[17] Although the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991, in the view of the U.S. Department of State, the treaty continued in force.

[19] An additional memorandum of understanding was prepared in 1997, establishing Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine as successor states to the Soviet Union, for the purposes of the treaty.

This was deemed inconsistent, as Russia did indeed inherit the USSR's obligations (including its UNSC seat, its debts, its agreements on nonproliferation etc.).

[22][20] On 13 December 2001, George W. Bush gave Russia notice of the United States' unilateral withdrawal from the treaty, in accordance with the clause that required six months' notice before terminating the pact—the first time in recent history that the United States has withdrawn from a major international arms treaty.

The next day, Russia responded by declaring it would no longer abide by the START II treaty, which had not entered into force.

[27] In interviews with Oliver Stone in 2017, Russian president Vladimir Putin said that in trying to persuade Russia to accept US withdrawal from the treaty, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had tried, without evidence, to convince him of an emerging nuclear threat from Iran.

[28] On 1 March 2018, Russian president Vladimir Putin, in an address to the Federal Assembly, announced the development of a series of technologically new "super weapons" in response to U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty.